Scientific American’s Steve Mirksy joked that he feared “the supply-side salmonella”. He would walk that back when I pointed out the large literature documenting the ways and means by which the economics of the egg sector is driving salmonella’s evolution.

The facts of the Ebola outbreak similarly turn Quammen’s objection on its head.

Guinea Forest Region in 2014 (Photo Credit Daniel Bausch)

The virus appears to have been spilling over for years in West Africa. Epidemiologist Joseph Fair’s group found antibodies to multiple species of Ebola, including the very Zaire strain that set off the outbreak, in patients in Sierra Leone as far back as five years ago. Phylogenetic analyses meanwhile show the Zaire strain Bayesian-dated in West Africa as far back as a decade.

An NIAID team showed the outbreak strain as possessing no molecular anomaly, with nucleotide substitution rates typical of Ebola outbreaks across Africa.

That result begs an explanation for Ebola’s ecotypic shift from intermittent forest killer to a protopandemic infection infecting 27,000 and killing over 11,000 across the region, leaving bodies in the streets of capital cities Monrovia and Conakry.

Explaining the rise of Ebola

The answer, little explored in the scientific literature or the media, appears in the broader context in which Ebola emerged in West Africa.

The truth of the whole, in this case connecting disease dynamics, land use and global economics, routinely suffers at the expense of the principle of expediency. Such contextualization often represents a threat to many of the underlying premises of power.

In the face of such an objection, it was noted that the structural adjustment to which West Africa has been subjected the past decade included the kinds of divestment from public health infrastructure that permitted Ebola to incubate at the population level once it spilled over.

The effects, however, extend even farther back in the causal chain. The shifts in land use in the Guinea Forest Region from where the Ebola epidemic spread were also connected to neoliberal efforts at opening the forest to global circuits of capital.

Daniel Bausch and Lara Schwarz characterize the Forest Region, where the virus emerged, as a mosaic of small and isolated populations of a variety of ethnic groups that hold little political power and receive little social investment. The forest’s economy and ecology are also strained by thousands of refugees from civil wars in neighboring countries.

The Region is subjected to the tandem trajectories of accelerating deterioration in public infrastructure and concerted efforts at private development dispossessing smallholdings and traditional foraging grounds for mining, clear-cut logging, and increasingly intensified agriculture.

The Ebola hot zone as a whole comprises a part of the larger Guinea Savannah Zone the World Bank describes as “one of the largest underused agricultural land reserves in the world.” Africa hosts 60% of the world’s last farmland frontier. And the Bank sees the Savannah best developed by market commercialization, if not solely on the agribusiness model.

As the Land Matrix Observatory documents, such prospects are in the process of being actualized. There, one can see the 90 deals by which U.S.-backed multinationals have procured hundreds of thousands of hectares for export crops, biofuels and mining around the world, including multiple deals in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Observatory’s online database shows similar land deals pursued by other world powers, including the UK, France, and China.

Under the newly democratized Guinean government, the Nevada-based and British-backed Farm Land of Guinea Limited secured 99-year leases for two parcels totaling nearly 9000 hectares outside the villages of N’Dema and Konindou in Dabola Prefecture, where a secondary Ebola epicenter developed, and 98,000 hectares outside the village of Saraya in Kouroussa Prefecture. The Ministry of Agriculture has now tasked Farm Land Inc to survey and map an additional 1.5 million hectares for third-party development.

While these as of yet undeveloped acquisitions are not directly tied to Ebola, they are markers of a complex, policy-driven phase change in agroecology that our group hypothesizes undergirds Ebola’s emergence.

The role of palm oil in West Africa

Our thesis orbits around palm oil, in particular.

Palm is a vegetable oil of highly saturated fats derived from the red mesocarp of the African oil palm tree now grown around the world. The fruit’s kernel also produces its own oil. Refined and fractionated into a variety of byproducts, both oils are used in an array of food, cosmetic and cleaning products, as well as in some biodiesels. With the abandonment of trans fats, palm oil represents a growing market, with global exports totaling nearly 44 million metric tons in the 2014 growing season.

Oil palm plantations, covering more than 17 million hectares worldwide, are tied to deforestation and expropriation of lands from indigenous groups. We see from this Food and Agriculture Organization map that while most of the production can be found in Asia, particularly in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, most of the suitable land left for palm oil can be found in the Amazon and the Congo Basin, the two largest rainforests in the world.

Palm oil represents a classic case of Lauderdale’s paradox. As environmental resources are destroyed what’s left becomes more valuable. A decaying resource base, then, is no due cause for agribusiness turning into good global citizens, as industry-funded advocates have argued. On the contrary, agribusiness seeks exclusive access to our now fiscally appreciating, if ecologically declining, landscapes.

Food production didn’t start that way in West Africa, of course.

Natural and semi-wild groves of different oil palm types have long served as a source of red palm oil in the Guinea Forest Region. Forest farmers have been raising palm oil in one or another form for hundreds of years. Fallow periods allowing soils to recover, however, were reduced over the 20th century from 20 years in the 1930s to 10 by the 1970s, and still further by the 2000s, with the added effect of increasing grove density. Concomitantly, semi-wild production has been increasingly replaced with intensive hybrids, and red oil replaced by, or mixed with, industrial and kernel oils.

Other crops are grown too, of course. Regional shade agriculture includes coffee, cocoa and kola. Slash-and-burn rice, maize, hibiscus, and corms of the first year, followed by peanut and cassava of the second and a fallow period, are rotated through the agroforest. Lowland flooding supports rice. In essence, we see a move toward increased intensification without private capital but still classifiable as agroforestry.

But even this kind of farming has since been transformed.

The Guinean Oil Palm and Rubber Company (with the French acronym SOGUIPAH) began in 1987 as a parastatal cooperative in the Forest but since has grown to the point it is better characterized a state company. It is leading efforts that began in 2006 to develop plantations of intensive hybrid palm for commodity export. SOGUIPAH economized palm production for the market by forcibly expropriating farmland, which to this day continues to set off violent protest.

International aid has accelerated industrialization. SOGUIPAH’s new mill, with four times the capacity of one it previously used, was financed by the European Investment Bank.

The mill’s capacity ended the artisanal extraction that as late as 2010 provided local populations full employment. The subsequent increase in seasonal production has at one and the same time led to harvesting above the mill’s capacity and operation below capacity off-season, leading to a conflict between the company and some of its 2000 now partially proletarianized pickers, some of whom insist on processing a portion of their own yield to cover the resulting gaps in cash flow. Pickers who insist on processing their own oil during the rainy season now risk arrest.

The new economic geography has also initiated a classic case of land expropriation and enclosure, turning a tradition of shared forest commons toward expectations whereby informal pickers working fallow land outside their family lineage obtain an owner’s permission before picking palm.

Palm oil and Ebola

What does all this have to do with Ebola?

Fig. 1 Palm Oil and Ebola

The figure at top left (of Fig. 1) shows an archipelago of oil palm plots in the Guéckédou area, the outbreak’s apparent ground zero. The characteristic landscape is a mosaic of villages surrounded by dense vegetation and interspersed by crop fields of oil palm (in red) and patches of open forest and regenerated young forest.

The general pattern can be discerned at a finer scale as well, above, west of the town of Meliandou, where the index cases appeared.

Nur Juliani Shafie and colleagues document a variety of disturbance-associated fruit bats attracted to oil palm plantations. Bats migrate to oil palm for food and shelter from the heat while the plantations’ wide trails also permit easy movement between roosting and foraging sites.

Bats aren’t stupid. As the forest disappears they shift their foraging behavior to what food and shelter are left.

Bush meat hunting and butchery are one means by which subsequent spillover may take place. But to move away from the kinds of Western ooga booga epidemiology that wraps outbreaks in such ‘dirty’ cultural cloth, agricultural cultivation may be enough. Fruit bats in Bangladesh transmitted Nipah virus to human hosts by urinating on the date fruit humans cultivated.

Almudena Marí Saéz and colleagues have since proposed the initial Ebola spillover occurred outside Meliandou when children, including the putative index case, caught and played with Angolan free-tailed bats in a local tree. The bats are an insectivore species also previously documented as an Ebola virus carrier.

Whatever the specific reservoir source, shifts in agroeconomic context still appear a primary cause. Previous studies show the free-tailed bats also attracted to expanding cash crop production in West Africa, including of sugar cane, cotton, and macadamia.

Indeed, every Ebola outbreak appears connected to capital-driven shifts in land use, including back to the first outbreak in Nzara, Sudan in 1976, where a British-financed factory spun and wove local cotton. When Sudan’s civil war ended in 1972, the area rapidly repopulated and much of the local rainforest—and bat ecology—was reclaimed for subsistence farming, with cotton returning as the area’s dominant cash crop.

Are New York, London and Hong Kong as much to blame?

Clearly such outbreaks aren’t merely about specific companies.

We have started working with University of Washington’s Luke Bergmann to test whether the world’s circuits of capital as they relate to husbandry and land use are related to disease emergence. Bergmann and Holmberg’s maps, still in preparation, show the percent of land whose harvests are consumed abroad as agricultural goods or in manufactured goods and services for croplands, pastureland and forests.

The maps show landscapes are globalized by circuits of capital. In this way, the source of a disease may be more than merely the country in which it may first appear and indeed may extend as far as the other side of the world. We need to identify who funded the development and deforestation to begin with.

Such an epidemiology begs whether we might more accurately characterize such places as New York, London and Hong Kong, key sources of capital, as disease ‘hot spots’ in their own right. Diseases are relational in their geographies, and not solely absolute, as the ecohealth cowboys chronicled by David Quammen claim.

Similarly, such a new approach ruins the neat dichotomy between emergency responses and structural interventions.

Some disease hounds who acknowledge global structural issues tend to still focus on the immediate logistics of any given outbreak. Emergency responses are needed, of course. But we need to acknowledge that the emergency arose from the structural. Indeed, such emergencies are used as a means by which to avoid talking about the bigger picture driving the emergence of new diseases.

The forest may be its own cure

There’s another false dichotomy to unpack—this one between the forest’s ecosystemic noise and deterministic effect.

Here a bit of math can help. A simple stochastic differential model of exponential pathogen population growth can include fractional white noise of an index 0 to 1 defined by a covariance relationship across time and space. An Ito expansion produces a classic result in population growth:

When below a threshold, the noise exponent is small enough to permit a pathogen population to explode in size. When above the threshold, the noise is large enough to control an outbreak, frustrating efforts on the part of the pathogen to string together a bunch of susceptibles to infect.

Never mind the technical details. The important point is that disease trajectories, even in the deepest forest, aren’t divorced from their anthropogenic context. That context can impact upon the forest’s environmental noise and its effects on disease.

How exactly in Ebola’s case?

It’s been long known that if you can lower an outbreak below an infection Allee threshold—say by a vaccine or sanitary practices—an outbreak, not finding enough susceptibles, can burn out on its own. But commoditizing the forest may have lowered the region’s ecosystemic threshold to such a point where no emergency intervention can drive the Ebola outbreak low enough to burn out on its own. The virus will continue to circulate, with the potential to explode again.

In short, neoliberalism’s structural shifts aren’t just a background on which the emergency of Ebola takes place. The shifts are the emergency as much as the virus itself.

In contrast to Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan—history as shit happens—we have here an example of stochasticity’s impact arising out of deterministic agroeconomic policy—a phenomenon I’ve taken to calling the Red Swan.

Here, sudden switches in land use may explain Ebola’s emergence. Deforestation and intensive agriculture strip out traditional agroforestry’s stochastic friction that until this point had kept the virus from stringing together enough transmission.

Under certain conditions, the forest may act as its own epidemiological protection. We risk the next deadly pandemic when we destroy that capacity.

Rob Wallace is an evolutionary biologist and public health phylogeographer currently visiting the Institute of Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. He also blogs at Farming Pathogens.

As we have covered extensively in recent months, Monsanto’s herbicide Glyphosate, the primary ingredient in their top-selling product “RoundUp” has been proven to cause cancer. Now, according to new reports, the chemical doesn’t even work and is creating a new resistance in weeds that make them more resilient and more difficult to get rid of.

“The days of going out and spraying RoundUp twice a year—those are long gone,” he said, adding that he was forced to use a cocktail of different chemicals, some of which are even more dangerous than RoundUp. Pietzyk and other farmers are now seeking new solutions to avoid the harsh pesticides used in conventional farming.

“People in urban areas and towns need to understand—we live here, we drink the water under the ground out here,” he says. “We want to be good stewards of what we’ve been entrusted with,” he said.

According to U.S. weed scientist Dallas Peterson, one type of weed, in particular, called Palmer amaranth, has become especially resistant to pesticides and is overgrowing farms across the country.

Complaints of herbicide-resistant weeds have become so common that the House Agriculture Committee has scheduled a meeting on December 4th to specifically address the situation.

Roundup, formulated to be used on GMO or “Roundup Ready” crops engineered to be resistant to it, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. It was originally introduced in the 1970s to control weeds and then took off when the planting of GMO crops skyrocketed in the past 15 years.

According to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), glyphosate use in the U.S. increased from about 20 million pounds in 1992 to 110 million pounds in 2002 to more than 280 million pounds in 2012.

In a statement released earlier this year, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) announced that glyphosate, the main ingredient in RoundUp, is “probably carcinogenic.”

John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war.

(Image: Honor the Earth)Native American communities are promising fierce resistance to stop TransCanada from building, and President Barack Obama from permitting, the northern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.

“No Keystone XL pipeline will cross Lakota lands,” declares a joint statement from Honor the Earth, the Oglala Sioux Nation, Owe Aku, and Protect the Sacred. “We stand with the Lakota Nation, we stand on the side of protecting sacred water, we stand for Indigenous land-based lifeways which will NOT be corrupted by a hazardous, toxic pipeline.”

Members of seven Lakota nation tribes, as well as indigenous communities in Idaho, Oklahoma, Montana, Nebraska and Oregon, are preparing to take action to stop Keystone XL.

“It will band all Lakota to live together and you can’t cross a living area if it’s occupied,” said Greg Grey Cloud, of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, in an interview with Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. “If it does get approved we aim to stop it.”

The indigenous-led ‘Moccasins on the Ground’ program has been laying the groundwork for this resistance for over two years by giving nonviolent direct action trainings to front-line communities.

“We go up to wherever we’ve been invited, usually along pipeline routes,” said Kent Lebsock, director of the Owe Aku International Justice Project, in an interview with Common Dreams. “We have three-day trainings on nonviolent direct action. This includes blockade tactics, and discipline is a big part of the training as well. We did nine of them last summer and fall, all the way from Montana to South Dakota, as well as teach-ins in Colorado and a training camp in Oklahoma.”

“We are working with nations from Canada and British Columbia, as well as with the people where tar sands are located,” Lebsock added.

“As an example of this nonviolent direct action,” explains Lebsock, in March 2012 people at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota held a blockade to stop trucks from transporting parts of the Keystone XL pipeline through the reservation.

In August 2013, members of the Nez Perce tribe blockaded megaloads traveling Idaho’s Highway 12 to the Alberta tar sands fields.

Descendants of the Ponca Tribe and non-native allies held a Trail of Tears Spiritual Camp in Nebraska in November to prevent the construction of the pipeline.

More spiritual camps along the proposed route of the pipeline are promised, although their date and location are not yet being publicly shared.

The promises of joint action follow the U.S. State Department’s public release on Friday of the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS). This report has been widely criticized as tainted by the close ties between Transcanada and the Environmental Resource Management contractor hired to do the report.

While the oil industry is largely spinning the report as a green-light for the pipeline, green groups emphasize that it contains stern warnings over the massive carbon pollution that would result if the pipeline is built, including the admission that tar sands oil produces approximately 17 percent more carbon than traditional crude.

The release of the FEIS kicked off a 90-day inter-agency review and 30-day public comment period. The pipeline’s opponents say now is a critical time to prevent Obama from approving the pipeline, which is proposed to stretch 1,179 miles from Alberta, Canada, across the border to Montana, and down to Cushing, Oklahoma where it would link with other pipelines, as part of a plan to drastically increase Canada’s tar sands production.

The southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline — which begins in Cushing, passes through communities in Oklahoma and East Texas, and arrives at coastal refineries and shipping ports — began operations last month after facing fierce opposition and protest from people in its path.

“Let’s honor the trail blazers from the Keystone XL south fight,” said Idle No More campaigner Clayton Thomas-Muller. “Time for some action, and yes, some of us may get arrested!”

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Industry consultants said anti-tar sands push could become ‘the most significant environmental campaign of the decade’ if activists were left unopposed.

Thousands of protesters demonstrate in Washington D.C. against the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline in February 2013. According to a 2010 Power Point presentation prepared by Strafor for industry, “activists lack influence in politics.” But letting the movement grow unopposed may bring about “the most significant environmental campaign of the decade.” Credit: Bora Chung

As environmentalists began ratcheting up pressure against Canada’s tar sands three years ago, one of the world’s biggest strategic consulting firms was tapped to help the North American oil industry figure out how to handle the mounting activism. The resulting document, published online by WikiLeaks, offers another window into how oil and gas companies have been scrambling to deal with unrelenting opposition to their growth plans.

The document identifies nearly two-dozen environmental organizations leading the anti-oil sands movement and puts them into four categories: radicals, idealists, realists and opportunists—with how-to’s for managing each. It also reveals that the worst-case scenario presented to industry about the movement’s growing influence seems to have come to life.

The December 2010 presentation by Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor, a global intelligence firm based in Texas, mostly advised oil sands companies to ignore or limit reaction to the then-burgeoning tar sands opposition movement because “activists lack influence in politics.” But there was a buried warning for industry under one scenario: Letting the movement grow unopposed may bring about “the most significant environmental campaign of the decade.”

“This worst-case scenario is exactly what has happened,” partly because opposition to tar sands development has expanded beyond nonprofit groups to include individual activists concerned about climate change, said Mark Floegel, a senior investigator for Greenpeace. “The more people in America see Superstorm Sandys or tornadoes in Chicago, the more they are waking up and joining the fight.”

The Power Point document, titled “Oil Sands Market Campaigns,” was recently made public by WikiLeaks, part of a larger release of hacked files from Stratfor, whose clients include the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry lobby. It appears to have been created for Calgary-based petroleum giant Suncor Energy, Canada’s largest oil sands producer.

The company told InsideClimate News that it did not hire Stratfor and never saw such a presentation. Suncor is mentioned 11 times in the document’s 35 pages and all of Stratfor’s advice seems to be directed at the energy company. For example, one slide says, “Campaign ends quickly with a resolution along the lines Suncor had wanted.” In several emails released by WikiLeaks, Stratfor employees discuss a $14,890 payment Suncor owes the company for two completed projects, though no details were provided.

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.
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Could cows and sheep halt climate change and tackle rural poverty?

A herder leads her sheep in search of grazing grounds in Inner Mongolia, which is fighting severe desertification. Photograph: How Hwee Young/EPA

Holistic management, with its counterintuitive claim that more, rather than fewer, cattle can improve the land, has been around for decades – a kind of perennial cattleman’s quarrel, and a thorn in the hide of ranchers and anti-ranchers alike.

The use of livestock as a tool for restoration has been scoffed at by scientists, reviled by vegetarians and those who blame cows for climate change, and a flashpoint for tension over how to conserve land in the American West.

Reviving grasslands

But that was before Allan Savory, who developed holistic management, won the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge for a programme with “significant potential to solve one of humanity’s most pressing problems.” And before governmental agencies such as USAID and large NGOs like the Nature Conservancy teamed up with the Savory Institute on international projects after seeing the benefits on the ground. And, in an era when one viral video makes the difference between anonymity and renown, before Savory’s TED talk, How to Green the Desert and Reverse Climate Change, flew round the Internet with some 2m views.

At the end of June, I attended the first Savory Institute International Conference, Transforming Landscapes for Global Impact, in Boulder, Colorado. This two-day event, attended by 300 ranchers, scholars and investors from around the world, showed that holistic management is now launched as a global movement – one that’s positioned itself as a vehicle for addressing seemingly intractable problems of climate change, desertification, and rural poverty.

The impetus is to bolster the deployment of holistic planned grazing to revive the grasslands of the world. Grasslands, also known as prairie, savanna, steppes or pampas, represent 40% of the world’s land surface. Much of this land is desertifying, or losing the capacity to sustain life; more than 10m hectares of productive land succumb to desertification every year.

Deploying cows, sheep and yaks to fight desertification

Since I began exploring soil as a crucible for our many overlapping ecological and economic crises – and for solutions – I’ve been intrigued by holistic management’s use of the humble cow, sheep, goat or, more exotically, camel or yak to remake the land. The results are most dramatic on “brittle” landscapes, that are dry much of the year and need to sustain moisture from one rainy season to the next.

Savory’s insight is that grasslands and ungulates evolved together, so that the land needs animals in the same way that animals need the land. All domestic animals have an impact on land; this impact can be positive or negative, depending on how they are managed. Land can be overgrazed but it can also be undergrazed, meaning that it suffers from lack of animal impact.

This notion surprises many people, who assume that leaving land alone is always better. But when, say, cattle are moved in a planned way, their behaviour kickstarts key biological processes that might have stalled, a situation that could lead to desertification.

“Nuclear Guinea Pigs”: Deadly Experiments and Contaminated Reality

Half a century ago, on the spurious grounds that extreme sacrifices were required in the battle to prevent a communist takeover of the world, the US government decided to use the citizens of Nevada as nuclear guinea pigs.

Although atomic testing was pursued there for several years in the 1950s, notification would have alarmed area residents. As a result, they weren’t even advised to go indoors. Yet, according to declassified documents, some scientists studying the genetic effects of radiation at the time were already concerned about the health risks of fallout.For most of those committed to the US nuclear program, the need to keep this type of research secret was a no-brainer. After all, if the public realized that the technology used to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki had led to experiments at home, early nuclear research – not to mention weapons deployment – might have met stronger opposition. The government badly wanted its nukes, and the scientists yearned to unlock the secrets of human mutation. Thus, an unholy alliance was struck.

US citizens, and the thousands of soldiers who took dangerous doses of radiation as part of other studies, haven’t been the only victims of science run amuck. Between 1964 and 1968, for example, at least a dozen covert tests of nerve and chemical agents were carried out on servicemen in the Pacific Ocean, then concealed and denied for more than 20 years. Crews were used to gauge how quickly various poisons could be detected, how rapidly they would disperse, and the effectiveness of protective gear and decontamination procedures.

Three tests used sarin, a deadly nerve gas subsequently employed by a cult to kill a dozen people in a Tokyo subway in 1995, or VX, the nerve gas that the US later accused Iraq of developing. One test used staphylococcal enterotoxin B, known as SEB, a crippling germ toxin; another used a “simulant” believed to be harmless but subsequently found to be dangerous. “We do not see things like informed consent or individual protection,” noted Michael Kilpatrick, a Defense Department medical official. “We don’t have the records for what, if any, protection was given to people.”

In a test called Fearless Johnny, carried out southwest of Honolulu during 1965, a Navy cargo ship was sprayed with VX nerve agent to “evaluate the magnitude of exterior and interior contamination levels” under various conditions of readiness, as well as study “the shipboard wash-down system,” according to documents declassified in 2002. Like all nerve agents, VX gas penetrates the skin or lungs to disrupt the body’s nervous system and stop breathing. Exposure can kill.

Another test, known as Flower Drum, involved spraying sarin gas into the ventilation system of a ship. The crew wore various levels of protective gear. A third experiment, Deseret Test Center Test 68-50, was conducted in 1968 to determine the casualty levels from an F-4 Phantom jet spraying SEB. A jet dropped the deadly mist over part of Eniwetok Atoll and five Army tugboats in the Marshall Islands. Public exposure of the secret tests and identification of those affected did not begin until 2000, and only under pressure from Mike Thompson, a California congressman who responded to veterans suffering health damage.

During the same period, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) spent millions on an even more heinous project: comparing atomic bomb survivors with an “uncontaminated” control group in South America, the Yanomami, who live in the remote Amazon regions of Brazil and Venezuela. Without informed consent or any government’s approval, thousands of blood samples were taken from the Indians, and extensive studies were conducted to provide crucial genealogical information on each tribe member. That the AEC research did nothing to help the Yanomami was bad enough. That it led directly to much needless suffering is a prime example of cultural imperialism at its worst.

As Patrick Tierney explained in Darkness in El Dorado, his harrowing account of scientific and journalistic exploitation, the AEC study was but one step in a decades-long process that brought illness, death, and degradation to the Amazon. To study iodine metabolism, ambitious researchers administered radioactive iodine to Yanomami tribes for 10 years. To prove questionable theories about aggression, anthropologists invaded countless communities, neglecting the sick and malnourished, while imposing their own agendas and setting inter-tribal conflicts into motion. Film crews and journalists joined in, bribing tribes to stage fights and feasts for the cameras. The Yanomami became the most famous “primitive” people in the world. But with that attention came modern weapons and imported disease.

Fukushima plant operator reverses claim groundwater not contaminated

Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc

TOKYO | Tue Jun 4, 2013 9:44am BST

(Reuters) – Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday it had detected radioactive caesium in groundwater flowing into its wrecked Fukushima Daiichi plant, reversing an earlier finding that any contamination was negligible.

The announcement is yet another example of Tokyo Electric initially downplaying a problem, only to revise its findings because of faulty procedures. It casts further doubt over its control over the cleanup of the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986.

“Once again, they’ve missed something they should be aware of,” said Atsushi Kasai, a former researcher of radiation protection at the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute.

“This shows again they lack the qualification to be managing the plant, which is the root cause of their failure to contain the March 11 disaster.”

In recent weeks, the company has been battling with leaks of radioactive water and power outages — more than two years after an earthquake and tsunami knocked out power and cooling and caused three reactor meltdowns.

The discovery that groundwater is also being contaminated before it enters the damaged reactor buildings compounds the problems for the company known as Tepco.

A laboratory technician uses a Geiger counter to measure radiation in fish, which was caught close to the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, at Fukushima Agricultural Technology Centre in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture May 28, 2013. Commercial fishing has been banned near the tsunami-crippled nuclear complex since the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake. The only fishing that still takes place is for contamination research, and is carried out by small-scale fishermen contracted by the government. Picture taken May 28, 2013. REUTERS/Issei Kato

A crab is hauled aboard the “Shoei Maru” fishing boat, close to Hirono town, about 25 km (19 miles) south of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Fukushima prefecture May 26, 2013. Operated by 80-year-old Shohei Yaoita and 71-year-old Tatsuo Niitsuma, the boat’s catch will be used to test for radioactive contamination in the waters near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility. Commercial fishing has been banned near the tsunami-crippled nuclear complex since the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake. The only fishing that still takes place is for contamination research, and is carried out by small-scale fishermen contracted by the government. Picture taken May 26, 2013. REUTERS/Issei Kato

A laboratory technician is seen through a closed door, as he tests for cesium levels in fish caught close to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, at Fukushima Agricultural Technology Centre in Koriyama, Fukushima prefecture May 28, 2013. Commercial fishing has been banned near the tsunami-crippled nuclear complex since the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake. The only fishing that still takes place is for contamination research, and is carried out by small-scale fishermen contracted by the government. Picture taken May 28, 2013. REUTERS/Issei Kato

Japan Today

Gov’t suggests TEPCO freeze soil around Fukushima plant

A government panel of experts on Thursday recommended that Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) consider freezing the soil around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to reduce the amount of radioactive groundwater being generated by water flowing into the plant.

According to the panel’s plan, pipes would be placed in the ground and filled with coolant at a temperature of minus 40 degrees Celsius. This would then freeze the surrounding soil, effectively acting as an underground wall around the plant.

The B.C. government has officially expressed its opposition to a proposal for the Northern Gateway pipeline project, saying it fails to address the province’s environmental concerns.

The province made the announcement in its final written submission to the Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel.

“British Columbia thoroughly reviewed all of the evidence and submissions made to the panel and asked substantive questions about the project, including its route, spill response capacity and financial structure to handle any incidents,” said Environment Minister Terry Lake.

“Our questions were not satisfactorily answered during these hearings.”

Lake said the province has carefully reviewed the evidence presented to the panel.

“The panel must determine if it is appropriate to grant a certificate for the project as currently proposed on the basis of a promise to do more study and planning after the certificate is granted,” Lake said.

“Our government does not believe that a certificate should be granted before these important questions are answered.”

In a news release, Enbridge executive vice president Janet Holder said the province’s five conditions can’t be fully met until the end of the review panel process, saying the company is working hard to meet the conditions and earn the confidence of the government and the people of B.C.

“As a British Columbian, I am personally committed, as is Northern Gateway, to building a pipeline project that meets the highest possible safety and environmental standards anywhere in the world and a project that creates new jobs and opportunities for British Columbians,” she said.

“At Northern Gateway, we are driven by our responsibility to do what’s right for B.C.’s economy and for B.C.’s environment.”

The review panel will hear final arguments starting next month, and must present a report to the federal government by the end of the year. The federal government will have the final say on whether the pipeline goes ahead.

VICTORIA, British Columbia, Canada, June 3, 2013 (ENS) – Oil spill cleanup concerns have led the British Columbia Government to reject a proposed multi-billion dollar tar sands oil pipeline that the Canadian company Enbridge wants to construct across the province.

In its final submission Friday to the federally-appointed Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel, the province states that it cannot support the Enbridge Northern Gateway project because the company “has been unable to address British Columbians’ environmental concerns.”

Environment Minister Terry Lake said, “British Columbia thoroughly reviewed all of the evidence and submissions made to the panel and asked substantive questions about the project including its route, spill response capacity and financial structure to handle any incidents. Our questions were not satisfactorily answered during these hearings.”

“Northern Gateway has said that they would provide effective spill response in all cases. However, they have presented little evidence as to how they will respond,” Lake said. “For that reason, our government cannot support the issuance of a certificate for the pipeline as it was presented to the Joint Review Panel.”

The Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, as proposed, is a twin pipeline system between Edmonton, Alberta and a new marine terminal in Kitimat, British Columbia, which would carry tar sands oil by pipeline across the province, to be loaded onto supertankers for transport to Asia.

The pipelines would cross B.C.’s sensitive Pacific North Coast ecosystem, and threatens First Nations’ land and salmon economy. A spill threatens long-term loss of marine life, pristine waterways, and coastal ecosystems.

First Nation opposition has been strong and united in the position that the Northern Gateway pipeline would never be allowed to cross their land. The pipelines could not be constructed without breaking First Nation unity through financial inducements or land seizure.

The provincial government has established, and maintains, five “strict conditions” in order for British Columbia to consider the construction and operation of heavy-oil pipelines in the province.

Successful completion of the environmental review process. In the case of Northern Gateway pipeline, that would mean a recommendation by the National Energy Board Joint Review Panel that the project proceed.

World-leading marine oil spill response, prevention and recovery systems for B.C.’s coastline and ocean to manage and mitigate the risks and costs of heavy-oil pipelines and shipments.

World-leading practices for land oil spill prevention, response and recovery systems to manage and mitigate the risks and costs of heavy-oil pipelines.

Legal requirements regarding Aboriginal and treaty rights are addressed, and First Nations are provided with the opportunities, information and resources necessary to participate in and benefit from a heavy-oil project.

British Columbia receives a fair share of the fiscal and economic benefits of a proposed heavy-oil project that reflect the level, degree and nature of the risk borne by the province, the environment and taxpayers.

“The five conditions cannot be fully met until the end of the Joint Review Panel process,” said Janet Holder, Enbridge’s executive vice president of Western access, told reporters. “As a British Columbian, I am personally committed, as is Northern Gateway, to building a pipeline project that meets the highest possible safety and environmental standards anywhere in the world—and a Project that creates new jobs and opportunities for British Columbians.”

An Enbridge pipeline is laid out for installation (Photo courtesy Northern Gateway)

In its written submission to the review panel on Friday, the company emphasized “the enormous economic benefits that the Project would deliver to Canada, British Columbia, Alberta and Aboriginal peoples.”

“The evidence provided by Northern Gateway … demonstrates that the Project would be safely designed and constructed, and that Northern Gateway is committed to ensuring excellence in operations. It shows that the pipelines would be constructed and operated without causing significant adverse effects to the environment,” the company wrote.

Tar Sand

What are the Tar Sands?

The “Tar Sands” (or if you are a business executive, “unconventional or heavy oil”) are naturally occurring deposits of petroleum, sand and clay mixed up to make an asphalt-like substance technically known as bitumen. For much of the 20th century, these deposits were largely ignored by oil companies as a source of petroleum due to the comparably inefficient process used to turn bitumen-in-the-ground into gasoline-in-the-tank, if you will. Now, because of dwindling production of conventional petroleum sources since the cresting of Hubbert’s predicted peak oil scenario, every major oil company in the world is now investing in tar sand extraction.

Bitumen, aka tar sand.

Where are the Tar Sands?

Bitumen deposits can be found all over the world, however most of these are too small or inaccessible to make development of these sites feasible. The only deposits currently under commercial development are in Venezuela’s Orinoco Basin, and Alberta, Canada’s taiga forest. The oil industries operations in the Alberta Tar Sands constitute about 90% on the world’s “unconventional oil” industry. The Alberta bitumen deposits stretch across an area roughly the size of Florida and are speculated to contain the world’s second largest (measured by recoverable barrels of oil) deposit of oil after the Saudi Arabian oil fields. Some studies suggest the Alberta Tar Sands are in fact the largest deposit.

Recently, plans have been submitted to begin extracting oil from tar sands in eastern Utah, as well.

Bitumen deposits in Alberta

Well, what’s so bad about that?

The tar sand boom in Alberta has been called the largest, most destructive industrial operation on the planet, ever. At a time when a changing climate and dwindling biodiversity across the globe threaten to drastically alter our way of life, at best, or wipe out all life on Earth, at worst, expansion of the tar sand industry is a step in the wrong direction if we are to develop a sustainable human existence. Tar sand mining irreversibly destroys landscapes, threatens the health of whole watersheds, negatively affects human communities, and accelerates climate change through greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation.

The tar sand mines of Alberta are the site of the second fastest rate of deforestation in the world, behind the slashing on the Amazon Rainforest. Bitumen is located deep underground and is too thick to be pumped to the surface by traditional means. Oil companies have learned that it is most profitable to dig the bitumen up using strip-mining techniques, such as those used in the coal industry’s mountain top removal mines. Vast expanses of pristine, old-growth taiga (aka boreal) forest are clear-cut. The timber is sold, pulped, burned or otherwise disposed of, along with several meters of peat moss (which any home-gardener can tell you is the richest, and rarest, soil-type there is) and every other living thing in the forest. Unlike regular logging operations, the clear-cutting that occurs before tar sand mining fails to offer even the most cynically token chance of forest recovery. This is because after the forest-scape is removed, the top layer of earth (referred to in the industry as “overburden”) is dug up and hauled away. This surface removal often reaches depths of several hundred feet. Only now is the bitumen accessible and promptly removed, leaving a lifeless moonscape where once there was a lush green wilderness.

This… from horizon to horizon

What impact does the tar sands have on the water?

Tar sand operations use extraordinary volumes of water. Certain types of bitumen extraction (known as “in-situ”) require great quantities of superheated water to be pumped deep underground to essentially melt the tar into a viscous enough substance to pump it to the surface. Bitumen, being too thick to flow naturally through transport pipelines, is diluted at giant facilities near the mines in preparation for pumping to distant refineries. This process, called “upgrading”, results in this localized cluster of tar sand facilities using as much water as the city of Calgary (population ~2 million).

The primary source of water for these processes is the Athabasca River. The Athabasca, a glacier fed river which feeds giant Lake Athabaska 765 miles downstream (this subsequently flows into the Mackenzie River system and, eventually, the Arctic Ocean). The tar sands sit approximately halfway, and this is the point at which great impact occurs. For every barrel of oil produced at the mines, ten barrels are sucked out of the Athabasca, up to half of which becomes so oily and toxic that it can never be excusably returned to the river. This oil-water is stockpiled behind some of the world’s largest dams (built from the overburden of the strip-mining process) to “settle,” or separate… an unproven process which even at best is expected to take several decades to complete, if ever. Meanwhile these toxic ponds grow to such vast size that they are visible from space.

Despite oil companies’ claim to the contrary, environmental reports state that more than five million gallons of this waste-water leaks out of the ponds and back into the river or groundwater annually. In communities downstream that have seen spikes in environmental red-flags such as mutations in wildlife and rare cancers among humans, the once pure Athabasca River is now considered poisonous and off-limits to drinking.

Wildlife near the tailings ponds face their own risks when mistakenly treating the ponds as hospitable, such as the 10,000 estimated waterfowl that die each year when coming into contact with the water’s surface. One such incident included between 500-1200 migrating ducks which died together when the flock landed on the pond.

Moving Beyond Oil:

With decreasing supply, oil is becoming harder to find and we are going to extremes to get it, including deep into the sea, threatening wildlife refuges, and destroying forests in Canada. Until we can kick our addiction, we will continue to go to great lengths to get every last drop of oil.

Stopping Tar Sands Development:

Tar sands oil is a dangerous and carbon-intensive way to extract oil from sand. In Wisconsin, a lot of our gasoline comes from tar sands oil. As a result, we must fight harder to reduce our dependence on the dirty oil source. Click here to learn more about tar sands oil.

Tar sands in Alberta, Canada. The Northern Gateway was going to connect the province to the Pacific coast. Photograph: Orjan F Ellingvag/Dagens Naringsliv/Corbis

Efforts to expand production from the Alberta tar sands suffered a significant setback on Friday when the provincial government of British Columbia rejected a pipeline project because of environmental shortcomings.

In a strongly worded statement, the government of the province said it was not satisfied with the pipeline company’s oil spill response plans.

The rejection of the pipeline – which was to have given Alberta an outlet to Pacific coast ports and markets in China – further raises the stakes on another controversial tar sands pipeline, Keystone XL.

Barack Obama is still weighing a decision on that pipeline, intended to pump tar sands crude to the Texas gulf coast.

British Columbia, in its official submission to a pipeline review panel, said the company had failed to demonstrate an adequate clean-up plan for the Enbridge Northern Gateway project. It set five new conditions for the project’s approval.

“Northern Gateway has presented little evidence about how it will respond in the event of a spill,” Christopher Jones, a lawyer representing the province, said in a statement to the federal government panel reviewing the project.

“It is not clear from the evidence that Northern Gateway will in fact be able to respond effectively to spills either from the pipeline itself, or from tankers transporting diluted bitumen,” Jones added.

A clean environment is important to us all. We have an obligation to maintain our resources and sustain our environment for future generations. Sustaining our environment has led us down the road to environmentalism. Then a strange thing happened. Environmentalism came to a fork in the road. While the rhetoric took one route, the agenda took another. Explore this topic and discover how Agenda 21 will affect you.

AGENDA 21 – UN Earth Summit (1992 Rio)

This classic video produced by George W. Hunt exposes how the progenitors of the hijacked environmental movement, people like Maurice Strong, the Rothschild family and David Rockefeller, always intended the scam to achieve global population reduction along with a global carbon tax based on a cap and trade system controlled by them.

Environmentalists rejoice as Agenda 21 is implemented across North America!

Environmentalists and TreeHuggers rejoiced today with the joint announcement from Barack Obama of the USA, Stephen Harper of Canada and Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico announce the agreement to fully implement Agenda 21 throughout the three countries. The multi-trillion Amero project will ensure a greener, healthier, fairer and more equally distributed future for the 99%.

Glenn Beck/Screen capture

Readers may remember that Agenda 21 started in Rio in 1992 and has been spreading ’round the globe ever since, as Treehugger types push the idea of living a low impact life with a small carbon footprint, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and saving the planet for all species. As one agender put it,

The objective of sustainable development is to integrate economic, social and environmental policies in order to achieve reduced consumption, social equity, and the preservation and restoration of biodiversity.

protecting biodiversity means giving the land back to the animals./Screen capture

In order to preserve that biodiversity and habitat, President Obama has announced the implementation of the wildlife reserve and corridor system across the USA, that will return most of the nation to its natural habitat.

Library of Congress/Public Domain

The Hoover Dam and others on major rivers will be deconstructed so that they can be returned to their natural state. This will cause some problems for cities like Phoenix and others in California that depend on the river’s water; the people will have to be relocated as there won’t be any water for drinking or lawns.

Fortunately, there are thousands of empty houses in Detroit and Buffalo and other northern cities that will be made available for occupation by the transplanted Phoenicians, who will be welcomed back, and given jobs on urban farms.

Since production of fertilizer requires fossil fuels and these contribute to climate change, all farming will be organic and done mainly by hand. This will provide a huge number of jobs for millenials now looking for work; a hundred and fifty years ago 80% of the population of North America worked in agriculture; now it is 3%. This is a great opportunity to put people back to work in productive jobs with lots of fresh air, exercise and sunshine.

Apartments produced in the LifeEdited Industries factories will accommodate families of all sizes and incomes; to keep consumption of materials and energy down, space will be rationed to 200 square feet per person, with a maximum unit size of 600 square feet. This will help control population growth, a major source of environmental problems. After all, Agenda 21 style living has been described as:

a future in which people would be forced to live with five others in 20-by-20 living spaces with push-button furniture in high-rises across major cities. The complexes would serve three vegetarian meals a day, feature mosques and have a 24-7 on-call doctor to discuss taking one’s own life.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressing higher education sustainability leaders at the September 20-21Sustainability Education Summit: “Citizenship and Pathways for a Green Economy.” He says his department is late to sustainability and education, but it’s getting underway.

Indoctrinating Our Youth in Earth Worship

William F. Jasper, investigative reporter for The New American magazine, uncovers the real objective behind the Earth Charter. Many U.S. city and educational officials have already been persuaded to endorse this pro-UN manifesto. Learn why this campaign, masquerading as a plan to protect the environment, is potentially lethal to family, faith, and freedom. A must-see video presentation!

REWILDING

Step by step, piece by piece, the Wildlands Project is coming to fruition. The Project, foundational to the U.N.Biodiversity Treaty which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, calls for approximately 50 percent of the United States to be set aside as “wildlands”, where no human can enter. Much has been accomplished over the past 10 years toward that goal, and the pace is stepping up, with the help of the federal agencies first under Clinton/Gore and now under Obama/Biden.

What, you may ask, is the Wildlands Project? It is a grandiose plan to transform at least half of the continental United States into an area free of modern industry and human habitation.

The father of this radical vision for a new green America is none other than Dave Foreman , principal founder of the eco-terrorist group EarthFirst!, and until 1997, a director of the Sierra Club . Carl Pope took the reign in 2002.

A vast network of powerful and influential environmental groups are taking great strides toward reaching the Wildlands’ goals. They are working toward the resurrection of a pre-industrial North America — the continent once known to Native Americans as “Turtle Island.” Foreman, in his own words, summarizes the Wildlands Project as a “bold attempt to grope our way back to 1492.” What kind of progressive notion is that, you might ask.

The deep ecology movement operates behind a sham of new age language and pseudoscience. Idealistic neo-pagans were courted and seduced by a pseudo spiritual rhetoric that masquerades the hidden agenda for power, money and control. They fell in love with the idea of this socially engineered, new earth religion “Gia”. This relationship came with weighty strings attached and they, lost in their beautiful delusions, danced at the puppet masters’ command.

Even so, these people consider themselves to be enlightened and always right, while they consider those with differing views to be ignorant and unenlightened. These eco-centrics have created their own vocabulary and terminology and this green “newspeak” has grown deep and extensive roots within our popular and political culture.

Wildlife Corridor Conservation Act Introduced

Politicians and other agents of Agenda 21 are inundating us with overlapping schemes that quietly and deliberately drown our property rights and freedom. For surefire evidence, take a look at U.S. Congress – H.R. 5101 Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2010. This bill includes transboundary tax-payer funded projects for wild animal bridges and tunnels, increasing roadless areas and other means to capture more natural resources and private property for government and its partners.

H.R. 5101 states that “The Secretary, in cooperation with the States and Indian tribes, shall develop a Habitat and Corridors Information System, that shall include maps and descriptions of projected shifts in habitats and corridors of fish and wildlife species in response to climate change; and to assess the impacts of existing development on habitats and corridors.” The System is charged with identifying, prioritizing and describing “key parcels of non-Federal land (i.e. state lands and private property) located within the boundaries of units of the National Park System, National Wildlife Refuge System, National Forest System, or National Grassland System that are critical to maintenance of wildlife habitat and migration corridors.” This is way over and above what the federal government has already swallowed up under other guises.

Congress and other elites are desperately clinging to the fraud of man-made global warming in an attempt to illegitimately wrest control of private property. Many people still nominally own and pay taxes on their private property but if their property is even slightly proximate to the imagined wildlife corridors, then animals rule as “new habitat” is created for them in response to “climate change” and other “threats” (meaning people). It doesn’t matter that grandma’s house has been there for 100 years and she and the animals get along fine. Not anymore, with this bill government will determine what if any use might be made of land that falls in or near corridors invented ostensibly to protect animals (in truth this is done to take private property and to control the human population).

The difference between this bill and previous wildland’s programs is that this one doesn’t just have teeth, it has fangs. Not only does it have “strong language calling on agencies to actually take steps to protect corridors” but it also calls for a funding mechanism (more taxes) to support “such protective action.” In short, we will be footing the bill for the global elite to further control our property and diminish our freedom under the guise of habitat protection. And “the Secretary of the Interior may transfer funds to the Foundation under this subsection in advance, without regard to when expenses are incurred.” How many of us can get paid whenever we want, even if we haven’t yet done the work?

Here are a few examples of Wildlife Corridor Program across the United States. Once again they are bad programs hiding behind pretty pictures and phony words. Rim of the Valley Los Angeles Basin, California, Buffalo Commons Plains States, USA and Yellowstone to Yukon or “Y to Y” plus there are many more.

Norman MacLeod of Washington explains that HR 5101 incorporates the legislative provisions of Section 481 of HR 2454 (the House version of the climate bill) and Section 6009 of the Kerry-Lieberman climate bill draft. These sections authorize a wildlife corridors information system. HR 5101 builds on this with implementation programs, mostly to be housed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Funding mechanisms and public-private structures are included. The bill has been referred to the House Natural Resources Committee.

This bill is intended to lead to the formal creation of several continental-scale wildlife corridor systems that include core habitat, connectivity, and buffer systems that will impact livelihoods, homes, ranches, farms, access to resources, outdoor recreation and more.

Buzzwords for a New Millennium
Biological diversity is a broad term which crops up in many environmental documents. It is used to define any kind of life form and its interrelation(s) to all the other life forms within any particular ecosystem a/k/a biome.

Bioregions, also known as biosphere reserves, are geo-political regions formed from land areas constituting similar ecosystems. The United Nations prefers the term “eco-regions,” and the Department of the Interior refers to them as Ecosystem Management Areas.

Under such a plan, areas that are now defined by state boundaries in the U.S., would be reorganized to follow similar landscape features. For example, the mountainous regions of Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky and West Virginia would constitute the Southern Appalachian Bioregion.

According to the enviro¬gurus, all human activity is damaging to a biosphere. Following that reasoning, they believe that people must be heavily regulated or removed in order to protect the balance of biodiversity within eco-regions.

First, a core area is established where no human activity is allowed. Core areas are the central component of the Wildlands Reserve program. Core areas are large and are taken mostly from National Forest and Park lands and adjacent private lands. Around the core is a buffer zone, consisting primarily of private land. Buffer zones may contain some housing development and human activity. According to the “grand plan,” however, no new development must be permitted. A transition area will surround the buffer zone. Human activity, such as tourism, or even some human settlement will be allowed. The transition area boundaries can be flexible. A corridor is an area of land that connects core areas with other core areas. Corridors generally follow rivers, streams and wildlife migration routes. Corridors consist of both public and private lands.

According to the Wildlands Project, no commercial development, housing or communities would be allowed within such a corridor. Imagine a national park that was 2,500 miles long, two counties wide and which passed through ten states from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. This is the Mississippi River Corridor, as designated by Congress. Numerous and costly studies will be made in this region in order to develop a unified federal program to control this ten-state area. Are you beginning to see how this plan will work?

There are sixty-eight other designated Heritage Areas and Corridors across our country in nearly every state of the Union. (this was true in 1999 – there may be more at this time)

THE ROAD RIP: Road Removal and Implementation Project

A common characteristic of core wilderness areas and interconnecting corridors is the absence of roads. Road RIP is an NGO dedicated to removing existing roads and preventing the construction of new roads. Since this paper was first written, many “road removal” projects have been implemented.

The original Road RIP radicals prepared handbooks for local activists that describe step-by-step procedures for challenging road construction and “Six Steps to Close a Road.” Sample letters, a comprehensive flow chart of the procedure and sample forms are provided to the organization’s chapters. The author of the work, Keith Hammer, is credited with forcing the Forest Service to remove or commit to remove more than 1,000 miles of roads in the Flathead National Forest.

The group is not content to close only roads in the national forests. Their ambitions run much higher. According to their literature:
“The best road density goal for maintaining and restoring ecological and evolutionary processes is ZERO—NO ROADS AT ALL. And what we call a road includes everything from interstate highways to two-track logging roads, off-road vehicle trails, and snowmobile routes. They are all swaths of ecological destruction.” And back to 1492 we go.

PRIVATE PROPERTY
In order for the Wildlands Project to be successful, thousands upon thousands of acres of private property need to be incorporated into biosphere reserves. Landowners were once free to use their land as they saw fit, as long as their actions did not harm other people. That changed with a 1972 decision by the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. In Just v. Marinette County, the Court ruled that:
“An owner of land has no absolute and unlimited right to change the essential natural character of his land so as to use it for a purpose for which it was unsuited in its natural state. ”

Simply put, the Wisconsin ruling set a legal precedence that a property owner could not “harm” the land itself. Fortunately, following cases favored landowners although the legal definition of “harm” was expanded and modified.

The Wildlands Project and other environmental organizations now campaign to “educate” the courts and public what they consider to be inappropriate land uses that “harms” others. The arguments which the eco-activists have dreamed up are convoluted and complex. They claim that when wetlands are filled, others are harmed by excessive run off and by the loss of the run off to the aquifer. When private property is clear cut others are harmed by the loss of biodiversity and so on, ad nauseum. They know the legal game and play it well. If they don’t want you to have it (property), they will find a way to take (legally steal) it from you.

The Sweet Home decision is an excellent example of how the Supreme Court is expanding the definition of harm. It was based on the notion that landowners can harm the land itself, which in turn, would affect and harm people.

“Others” that are affected are often unidentified souls that may be indirectly impacted by the loss of some imagined benefit. This case has left the door wide open for government restrictions upon private property owners. A favorite scheme used to implement the Wildlands Project, is for the federal government to offer a variety of flexible conservation easements to property owners. The owner retains title to the property and continues to pay taxes on it even though specific uses of the property are relinquished to the easement holder. Further, they often receive a pittance for the rights they gave up and future generations are robbed of the property uses which were forfeited.

The Nature Conservancy and other land trusts have led the way in exploiting this technique of separating resource utilization from the bundle of rights which traditionally have been considered private property rights and other non-profits have learned those techniques.

From the Global to the National to the Local
It is no coincidence that an article about the Wildlands Project first appeared in the 1992 special issue of Wild Earth, * an EarthFirst! publication. After all, the United Nation’s Convention on Biological Diversity also took place that very same year, and come to think about it, so did the release of Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance.

Not surprisingly, one of Al Gore’s first acts as Vice President was to establish an Ecosystem Management Policy. This directive was implemented via various resource management agencies within our federal government. (It should be noted that the Sierra Club published a map of the new America, broken down into 18 bioregions. )

Codex Alimentarius Lecture by Ian R. Crane – 1 thru 9

With biting political analysis, Ian R. Crane probes the track record of those who openly crave the introduction of a One World hierarchical Government. He exposes the agenda of those who have presided over events leading directly to the launching of the illegal wars in Afghanistan & Iraq and who continually demonstrate their desire to perpetuate a state of permanent global conflict; whilst systematically eroding personal freedom, through the process of gradualism.

The State Department, still with “egg on its face” from its statement that Keystone XL would have little impact on climate change, sunk a little lower today as the most respected elders, and chiefs of 10 sovereign nations turned their backs on State Department representatives and walked out during a meeting. The meeting, which was a failed attempt at a “nation to nation” tribal consultation concerning the Northen leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline neglected to address any legitimate concerns being raised by First Nations Leaders (or leading scientific experts for that matter).

Tribal nations added probably the most critical danger of the pipeline which is to the water. Their statement is below:

On this historic day of May 16, 2013, ten sovereign Indigenous nations maintain that the proposed TransCanada/Keystone XL pipeline does not serve the national interest and in fact would be detrimental not only to the collected sovereigns but all future generations on planet earth. This morning the following sovereigns informed the Department of State Tribal Consultation effort at the Hilton Garden Inn in Rapid City, SD, that the gathering was not recognized as a valid consultation on a “nation to nation” level:

The Great Plains Tribal Chairmans Association supports this position, which is in solidarity with elected leaders, Treaty Councils and the grassroots community, and is guided by spiritual leaders. On Saturday, May 18, the Sacred Pipe Bundle of the Oceti Sakowin will be brought out to pray with the people to stop the KXL pipeline, and other tribal nation prayer circles will gather to do the same.

Pursuant to Executive Order 13175, the above sovereigns directed the DOS to invite President Obama to engage in “true Nation to Nation” consultation with them at the nearest date, at a designated location to be communicated by each of the above sovereigns. After delivering that message, the large contingent of tribal people walked out of the DOS meeting and asked the other tribal people present to support this effort and to leave the meeting. Eventually all remaining tribal representatives and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers left the meeting at the direct urging of the grassroots organization Owe Aku. Owe Aku, Moccasins on the Ground, and Protect the Sacred are preparing communities to resist the Keystone XL pipeline through Keystone Blockade Training.

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